Solving Wicked Problems

We are faced with “wicked problems”1 requiring us to find cross-disciplinary answers to solve some of the most pressing issues facing society today.

To solve these wicked problems we need to clearly define problem conditions, develop flexible and open workflows, and build the tools that allow us to take advantage of the knowledge we have been developing across disciplines over the last century for data collection, analysis and assimilation. We must also develop outreach solutions that help ensure equity within academic and public spheres.

About Me

My publication record focuses on relationships between biotic systems and large scale climatic change at time-scales of centuries to millennia, but my research efforts focus on facilitating broader engagement with the tools and methods necessary to build the technical toolkits we require to move forward as a society.

Domain specific knowledge is important in managing research questions or looking for solutions, but increasingly, domain knowledge needs to be supported by experience in building research infrastructure, undertaking outreach, managing complex workflows, and planning projects with multiple interconnected components. My research activities pair deep understanding in the paleogeosciences with project management skills in geoinformatics, as part of the Neotoma Paleoecological Database, and within EarthCube.

News

My work using GeoGeepDive to recover spatial metadata from legacy publications featured on the EarthCube blog.
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Our opinion piece in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment is out!

Implementing continuous integration with RMarkdown documents to ensure documents with external dependencies are reproducible.
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How to use Leaflet and R's Shiny package to interactively explore spatial data.
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1: Rittel & Webber 1973. A wicked problem is a complex problem that often has no clear solution, either because there are competing factors, the conditions change, knowledge is incomplete, or because the problem itself is poorly defined.